


Rational(e)

by ChristinaK



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Betrayal, Conscience, F/M, Madness, Rationalization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 14:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2655173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChristinaK/pseuds/ChristinaK
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gaius Baltar hasn't run out of excuses. Yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rational(e)

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd. 3am ramblings of the obsessed. All credit to Universal and the SciFi channel. With props to James Callis, for walking that fine line between pitiable, smackable, and mesmerizing.
> 
> First published on Livejournal in 2003. Jossed to heck and gone since then, but the series was so confusing, who knows if it's wrong?

"Don't you think I would tell you?"

"As if you were ever forthcoming, darling. Your love doesn't include honesty, does it? Just necessity."

She is hovering over him again. A fantasy, a phantasm, a fantastic fascination, the untouchable essence of beauty and devotion that lives in between the photons that others see. He hates her more than he has ever loved anyone else, quite possibly including himself. Gaius suspects that if he told her this, it would either please or enrage her, and self-preservation and self-loathing keep him from engendering either.

He can not think of her by her human name any more. Not knowing what he knows. The sixth of twelve-- and if his mind occasionally goes to luridly detailed imaginary meetings between himself and other surviving copies of her, it more often cringes away at being relentlessly pursued by all the versions of his Cylon stalker. Unless, of course, it's only memory. Random associations firing and framing his guilt, the guilt he does not feel, because-- because only small people feel guilt, of course. Brilliant people cope with adversity, with reverses in fortune. Geniuses adjust. Madmen do both at once, cope and break, twist and persist. But he is not mad. Because he would know if he were mad.

Unless he isn't a man. Which would explain so very much.

"You said, and I quote, 'we should record your brainwave patterns.' How do I know you didn't? If you could inject me with a chip that allows me to see you, then surely a simple electroencephalogram reproduction isn't beyond your abilities."

"Of course. But why would we? We were about to destroy your entire race. Creating a copy of Gaius Baltar-- while it would be amusing-- wasn't necessary for our success. You'd already served your purpose."

He smiles at her, watches her bend closer, all pale glowing skin, scarlet lips, and white-gold hair, and thinks of lamias and blood-drinking wraiths, of ghosts that steal into a man's bed and appropriate his soul. He can almost believe that he smells her perfume, and surely, surely a chip in his head could not recreate that. 

If he didn't know he was too strong to break, he would be happy to be mad.

"Yes, we both know how very clever you were. One can't fault your competence in serving your god. Or at least, your vision of him." He tilts his head back, studies her through his eyelashes, and she dips close, almost brushing her lips against his, pulling back only as he whispers into a space that should be warm with her breath. "There is no possible way I could have walked out of my home alive, not when the bombs hit so close. I have a blank space in my memory after the house collapsed. The first thing I remember is running across the field to the Raptor. I don't know how I got there; that could be your doing."

Her lips curve in a smile of absolute delight and awe. "Is that what you're telling yourself? That I made a copy of your consciousness? Created a body for you, as a Cylon? That you feel no guilt because you're one of us?"

"You could have done it." He does not feel guilt. It would be insane to take responsibility for all the events he could not control, and he is not insane. 

But he can, sometimes, wonder why he doesn't. Can fear that his guilt has taken shape out of emotions he can't access or feel properly, and that the shape it has taken is her. Then he wonders if Cylons can feel such an emotion, if the deaths of four billion people ever strike them as anything other than necessary. Wonder if he is still in shock, in denial, or if he is simply everything she said he was: selfish to the core. "If you can create such-- perfect-- copies of humanity, copying any single individual would be child's play." 

"Could have. Maybe. But would have? Why?"

"Because you love me." 

"That's true. I love you for your mind. So clear, so focused... If that was preserved, the shell would hardly matter." She places her hands on his shoulders, slides downward onto his lap. And that can't be body heat he perceives, no chip ever built could do so much (except, he realizes, it could; if sited correctly, it could tune into his limbic system, make him believe anything it wants, that cold is hot, that air is weight, that pain is love.) So he doesn't move, doesn't touch the perfect body brushing (illusion, all deception) against him, doesn't respond (even though his body wants what it wants and he has never denied it any desire). 

"And to give the Cylons one more agent to control."

Six looks thoughtful, seduction held in abeyance the way it is when she talks about souls and love and truth. If Baltar were capable of love-- and he freely admits that he never contemplated the concept as applied to himself-- and if she were not who she is, he might have loved her for her occasional gravity, the strange depths that offered more than a moment's pleasure. Tantalizing thoughts went through her mind, inexplicable in their illogic, offering the distracting solution to a puzzle, the lazy entertainment of picking out order among their chaos. 

But she may have killed him, may have betrayed him even more than he knew, and done it all for a possessive urge he has always abhorred. So the potential for love will never be a factor again.

"If I did, it doesn't seem to have worked, does it?" She smiles gently at him, then strokes a ruby fingernail down his temple, across his cheekbone, down to his chin, half-caress, half-threat. "So I think you just disproved your hypothesis, Gaius. If you were one of us, you certainly wouldn't be working against us so vigorously. If not entirely efficiently." 

"It proves nothing." Baltar holds himself rigid, does not lean into her touch. Does not reach up to break a neck that isn't there, or pull her down for a devouring kiss from ghost-lips. 

"No?"

"No. I could be a sleeper, left to be activated later when most useful. Or so you and your cohorts might think."

She gazes at him through half-lidded eyes, a lioness too sated to attack. "And why would we be wrong?"

His smile is unfeigned, pure malicious joy. "Because, my dear, sweet hallucination. My prerogatives are stronger than any programming you might have implanted." He grabs her wrist, and she almost flinches away as he brings the hand to his mouth for a soft kiss. "Survival. Success. Self-determination." He lets go of her fingers, which curl around his chin, lingering, seeking. "You won't win. Not this time. I will."

The sunburst smile she bestows on him is indulgent. "I'm counting on it. I love you, Gaius. That's why I wanted you to survive. More than any minor plan or stratagem. Love is God. And God wants you to live."

"So I can love you back. Someday."

"Someday," she agrees.

"And if someday never comes?"

"Never is a long time, Gaius. And I will never die." She brushes a kiss across his earlobe, and whispers: "And maybe you won't, either."

When he opens his eyes, she is gone, not even a lingering scent or trace of warmth to tease his senses. No hint as to whether she has any more substance than a day dream. He gets up from the chair slowly, and paces his small cabin in even, measured strides.

Mad. Or a Cylon. Possibly self-obsessed. Quite delusional. Or artificially generated. Or simply egomaniacally narcissistic. All the same, really. Human or Cylon, mad or sane, he feels no guilt. 

Baltar stops in front of the small porthole in the wall, and smiles cynically out at the stars. If she disappears some day in the far future, he will face that the culpability is his and his alone. Take responsibility. Privately, of course. No need to mention it to anyone else, or jeopardize his work, the survival of thousands, for what he truly couldn't control. Until then, he will cease questioning himself, and work towards the preservation of the Galactica and by extension, himself. She is responsible, not he, and as long as she continues to torment him he won't have to forget that.

If Six knows him as well as she thinks she does, she had to know he'd come to this conclusion. It is perhaps the best available proof that she loves him.

Baltar lies down on his narrow bed, closes his eyes, and begins to construct the lies he will need to protect himself tomorrow and the procedures he will need to out any other Cylons on the battlestar, and ignores the warm weight that shifts next to him, the arm that encircles his waist, and the blonde head that droops against his shoulder.


End file.
